Wheel Hub Production

Wheel Hub Production

March 1, 2015

What’s the first rule of making multiples? Yep. Set up a production line.

Icewave’s off-the-shelf wheels have custom-made wheel hubs that are used to mount the wheel on our custom drive shafts. The robot uses four wheels at all times, but it also needs to be versatile enough to deal with different types of enemies. We can use 3″ diameter, 4″ diameter or a combination thereof to achieve interesting battle capabilities. So we needed at least 10 (8 plus two spares) wheel hubs from our production line.

The hubs were CNC milled from aluminum rod stock. Blanks were cut to length on the band saw, then installed into the CNC where the program used two separate operations to finish the top, bottom, exterior features and interior bore to .0005″ precision. Keyways were cut with a keyway broach, and then the hubs were heated with a propane torch and pressed into the delrin wheel bodies.

What does that look like, you ask? Well, Angie will show you in the short video below.